


The Deed

by metrophobic



Series: SP Drabble Bombs [2]
Category: South Park
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-05-27
Packaged: 2019-05-14 14:55:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metrophobic/pseuds/metrophobic
Summary: Tweek finally finds the courage to confront a painful part of his past.Written for the May 2018 Drabble Bomb - Day 1: Decade.





	The Deed

“Sure you’re up for this?”

“Yeah.”

They’re on their knees in the dusty attic of Tweek’s childhood home. The air is stale around them; untouched. Sometimes, when he thinks of this house, Tweek would like to burn it and everything that still remains inside. But instead, the flame’s lit in his mind: he sets fire to the memories that are scattered across endless pages, and watches them crumple away into ash.

It’s just a coping technique, nothing more.

“Be downstairs if you need me.” Kenny touches him on the shoulder, briefly, and then he’s ascending down the rickety stairs. They creak under his footsteps before the noises fade away. Tweek wanted to come here alone. _This is for me,_ he insisted. _This is my closure, and I can’t drag you down with me._ It became the source of a series of conflicts.

_I don’t care._

_We’re in this together._

_Your life is mine too._

_Why can’t you trust me?_

But in the end, Craig relented—partially. He still didn’t want Tweek to go alone. _Just please, take someone with you. I’m not ordering you to, you’re free to do whatever you want, but I want you to be safe._ Kenny was the first person he asked. He agreed without hesitation.

Even after fifteen years of being together, growing together, growing _up_ together, Tweek still has trouble sometimes with Craig’s concern over him. He has mantras in his head that he has to recite to himself every time the questions—questions that he _knows_ are perfectly normal—cause his chest to tighten and his whole body to grow cold. They’re not an effort to keep tabs on his location, or force him to answer for his whereabouts. He’s not going to get in _trouble_ if he doesn’t answer his phone right away, or if he doesn’t smile when he tells the truth. Craig isn’t trying to _control_ him. He’s just trying to love him, and this is what happens when someone loves you. They want to make sure you’re safe, and they want to take care of you.

He finds the first of many boxes and pries it open. A little cloud of dust drifts all around him, and he sneezes. It’s filled to the brim with memorabilia. Old aprons, coffee mugs, hats and visors, pound-size bags of beans. All of them emblazoned with the logo from what was once his father’s pride and joy: _Tweek Bros._

Even though he knows there’s no way in Hell he’s going to want to keep any of this stuff, Tweek finds himself rummaging through the box anyway. One of the mugs is chipped somewhere in the rim. Tweek remembers this one quite clearly. It was the day it all began; the beginning of the end. He was fifteen back then, and though it wouldn’t be ten years to the exact date _today,_ it would be close enough.

Briefly he contemplates setting it aside just so he can take a hammer to it, smash the entire thing to smithereens and throw them all over the backyard; but instead he replaces the top on the box, and moves on to the next.

More dust. There’s always more dust—isn’t there? Can this much accumulate in such a short span of time, even if that span of time’s encompassed his adult life up until now? Tweek hadn’t been ready to grow up when it happened, but he didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, did he?

It’s his mother’s wedding dress. Beneath it, a stack of letters. Tweek always wondered if she’d ever write to him, some kind of legacy to be discovered on her passing, but when he opens them up, they’re just stupid love letters from his father.

_Our love is like the meadow after a fresh spring rain._

_We will crash on the shore together, like two waves from the sea._

On and on they went. Not a single mention of Tweek anywhere. Tears sting his eyes, and he rips them in half, one by one, and sets them aside. It’s going to be the burn pile.

He doesn’t want to look through a time before he existed. That’s not why he’s here, anyway. Tweek shoves the box aside and opens another. There’s photo albums in that one. His mother, round with him. His father, smiling and giving a thumbs-up beside him just after delivery, but you can’t even see Tweek in the photo. Richard’s taking up the entire space, and there’s only a glimpse of his mother behind him.

Go figure.

His childhood’s always been a blur, and it's surreal to look down on himself like this. Birthdays, Christmases, scenes from the shop—they pull at something in him, deep down in his gut. Craig’s in a lot of them. They were so young and stupid back then, and his father loved to capitalize on anything he could find between them. It was great to have a son who also doubled as a cash cow, and Richard Tweak was determined to milk him for all he was worth. Tweek smiles to himself, because he knows all the bigger, greater milestones are out of his father’s reach. His first time driving, homecomings, proms, graduation, off to college, graduating college, their first place—none of it was anything that his father could even hope to touch.

The photo albums up here, they end at precisely ten years ago. The beginning of the end.

They go on the burn pile, too.

There’s another, smaller box behind him. Tweek pops it open, and immediately yelps in alarm when a brown spider goes scurrying out of the lid and vanishes under one of the boxes lying next to him. He shudders and throws the lid across the attic, then promptly moves away from the storage area entirely and perches there by the stairs. Kenny doesn’t call up after him. Is he still even there? —Yes, of course he is. There’s footsteps hurrying up the stairs that separate the second floor from the first.

“I’m _okay!_ ” Tweek calls down to him. “It was just a spider!”

“OK,” Kenny replies, and Tweek listens to him vanish. His heart’s still pounding.

The box he’s holding now, this is the most important. It’s a bunch of documents. Birth certificates—not just his own, but that of his parents’, too—and the title to the house. The car registration. A bunch of sales sheets and other documentation for the coffeeshop. His father’s will, which causes Tweek’s lip to curl with contempt. And then, underneath it: death certificates.

That day still haunts him. He dropped the coffee cup in the kitchen. It splattered to the ground, and he was already going to be late for school, so he hightailed it out of there before his father had a chance to make him feel like shit over it. Tweek’s father rarely yelled at him. It was always the quiet things he said that would work their way into his brain, and convince him of his own reality. A reality where he was the reason for everything gone wrong in their lives. It took many years of deprogramming by the people who really loved him for Tweek to see the truth.

If he lingered that day, if he stopped to clean up, if he apologized—would he even be here today? Would he still exist to dig through the broken remains of his former family in a dusty old attic, would his mother have succeeded in making everything right again?

Tweek can’t blame her for what happened. Some days, he wondered if he was that close to having his own hand forced instead. Some days, he wondered if he’d ever even make it out alive, and if there would only ever be one way to ensure that.

But sometimes, now, he wonders, he demands to know: why did you have to take yourself out of the picture, too?

He snatches up the papers that he’d set aside and stuffs them all inside the box. Then Tweek descends, arms filled with dusty leatherette photo albums and that box, perched carefully on top. He doesn’t bother to flip up the staircase again. They can do that later. There’s something far more important that demands his attention right now.

“Kenny?” he asks, swallowing past the quaver in his voice as he walks down to the living room. Kenny’s sitting there on his phone, legs crossed, and Tweek’s sure he’s probably drawn pale. He certainly doesn’t feel like there’s any colour left in his face. He’s gone white and dusty, just like the ghosts in that attic.

“Found ‘em?” Kenny looks up from his phone.

“Yeah,” Tweek says, more firmly. “Let’s do this.”


End file.
